The occasion of Victory Day (or Victory in Europe Day), celebrated on May 8 in the West and at the turn of midnight on May 9 in Russia, will be an opportunity to repeat such gestures. If the United States could do that then, why could it not do a green industrial revolution today? Among both advocates of global financial reform on the left and defenders of mainstream multilateralism at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, references to the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 are de rigueur. Roosevelt’s call in 1940 to construct a giant air fleet. The last 18 months have seen repeated references to the war as a moment of collective mobilization. debt-to-GDP ratio is now expected to exceed levels reached during World War II. In the scramble for ventilators and personal protective equipment, countries have invoked the model of the war economy. Since his miraculous hospital recovery, Prime Minister Boris Johnson seems to want to be both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee at the same time.

In Britain, references to the war have been everywhere. It is ironic in a sense because, at least in Anglophone countries, COVID-19 has catapulted the war back into the public mind. In 2020, public health concerns kept them away. In 2015, the Western states had absented themselves from the mammoth 70th anniversary parades in Moscow and Beijing. For the first time in many years, Moscow was also expecting substantial delegations from the West. The latest generation of Russian military hardware was to have been on display. It was to have commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and the heroic fight of the Red Army in particular. One of the casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic is the great Victory Day parade that had been planned for Moscow’s Red Square for May 9.

Victory day in france